I think that (given a supported motherboard) being able to access ECC ram is a bigger thing... AMD on ASUS can do ECC at a price point much better than Xeon. Power usage is another issue though.
A big reason to consider AMD is that they tend to always just enable pretty much all their features for every chip rather than cherry pick what they enable for each market segment like Intel does.
yes it's about time, for example, that we had ECC ram capability in consumer-grade CPUs instead of having to pay double/triple for a XEON that doesn't even outperform (much).
What's the point of ECC RAM in consumer PCs?
Same reasons as ECC on a server, or for that matter, being able to do a lower cost home or small office server. The same rules apply on a desktop too though, just less risk of impact from corrupt data in memory for a consumer PC vs server. That said, most offices are using consumer grade CPUs and hardware too.
> What's the point of ECC RAM in consumer PCs?
Some people do very professional stuff with consumer PCs.
I've got ECC (unregistered but still) in my "consumer grade" desktop[1] today, and have for a while; while many motherboards don't say whether they support ECC or not, some do and most AMD CPUs do as well.